Audra D. Wilford, Chief Hope Officer
Classically trained in the culinary arts in Scottsdale, AZ, Audra became a skilled cook at four-star restaurants before she was 20 years old. In both Arizona and Maine she worked several positions from grill to sauté to saucier and discovered her passion for food went beyond the kitchen. She jumped to the “front of the house” and became both a server and bartender while finishing her college degree with a focus on political science, public policy, and health disparities.
After finishing college she went to graduate school, earning a degree in philosophy and education from Columbia University with the goal of becoming an educator. Audra moved into leadership training in higher education, but her passion for food never waned. Instead of cooking for hundreds of people a night, her focus turned to cooking alongside her husband for their two children.
Then, just over twelve years ago, Audra's son Max was diagnosed with brain cancer. She reflexively fell back on her culinary training and turned to food as medicine. Alongside intensive brain surgeries, a year-and-a-half of chemotherapy, 30 rounds of radiation, Gamma Knife radiation treatment, and a targeted checkpoint inhibitor, Audra used the kitchen as her tool to help Max thrive in the face of cancer. As Audra met other moms with children in cancer treatment, she heard the consistent needs for culinary education, nutrition science education, and integrative medicine resources.
Listening to these needs, and right in the middle of Max’s chemotherapy treatment, Audra started the MaxLove Project (MLP), a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the quality of life of families facing childhood cancers, pediatric rare diseases, and chronic hospitalizations with evidence-based culinary medicine, integrative care, and emotional health.
Today MLP serves thousands of childhood cancer families across the U.S., providing them with a one-of-a-kind evidence-based online community and e-learning mobile app, culinary medicine classes (online, community-based, and in the hospital), personalized nutrigenomics, an innovative cookbook, mental & emotional healthcare, integrative wellness retreats, acupuncture, nurse coaching, expert-designed integrative health e-learning, and much more! MLP also funds and conducts cutting edge integrative medicine research.
MLP’s programs and resources support families in the key areas of quality of life care and survivorship health. Each program focuses on several “super actions” for lifelong healthy survivorship. We are a community of dedicated change-makers who believe in the power of high quality integrative health care for all children.
Audra is also a certified functional medicine health coach, L'Oreal Paris Women of Worth honoree, as well as the co-founder and CEO of Yes Collective, a digital emotional health & fitness studio.